Date: 07.09.2020

Important: You can still full-text search all pages you saved or annotated.

We are at a pivotal moment of our company's path. We were running short on money (not anymore!) and had a product that still has a lot of bugs & performance issues, and not a crystal clear product direction.

We're making some revenue, but not enough to sustain operations.

We realized although its a valuable feature to search your browsing history, its not solving a super frequent and painful problem for users. Therefore having this feature as our main feature has not been a good idea.

We spent so much time on building the search and with it also 30-50% more time on every new feature because of interdependencies with the amount of data produced.

End2End encrypted sync, backup, search performance, search filters, all were directly or indirectly necessary to work much better than we can afford. We're just 2.5 devs.

What changes?

1. We disabled the ability to index every single page you visit. Only pages you actively bookmark, tag, list or annotate are full-text searchable.
2. We focus fully on developing features to share, collaborate with peers and integrate into your existing synthesis workflows with tools like @RoamResearch, @NotionHQ or your own blog.
3. We're probably going to have a far more stable product in the near future. Search really took a toll on the maintainability of Memex.

Going forward:

Essentially it boils down to one question: Where can we provide most value with the least amount of effort?

Listening closer to our audience and prioritising well it was clear that there were still 2 main issues right now:

1. Getting curated pages & annotations into writing workflows with tools like Notion, RoamResearch or your personal blog
2. Collaboratively curating and discussing web content on atomic levels (sentences, images, video sections)